Runes Under the Floorboard (version 2)

Intro

Kept a hatch beneath the kitchen where the pine boards meet

Every mark's a memory the mortgage couldn't keep

Some men trust a Bible, some a lawyer, some a bank

I trust the grain of wood my great-grandfather sank

Verse

Granddad worked the coal face, lungs stitched with dust and grime

Fourteen hours under earth, paid in scrip he couldn't spend on time

Company owned the store, the church, the water and the light

So he built his own economy in secret every night

Pulled the boards up in the kitchen when the family went to bed

Scratched a line for every dollar that the ledger never said

Circle for a birth, a cross for a brother turned to stone

Triangle for winters that he made it through alone

Wife thought it was superstition, some old country rite

He said counting keeps the counting man from taking what ain't right

Thirty years of marks beneath the pine before he passed

Told my father find them, read them, make the next mark last

Father added seventeen before the mill closed down the gate

Said a man who tracks his debts will never owe past what he's paid

I was seven when I found the hatch beneath the kitchen chair

Didn't know the symbols yet, but I could feel the prayer

Chorus

Runes under the floorboard, one for every year

Carved by lamplight when the collectors wouldn't hear

Some for hunger, some for luck, some for the ones we lost

Legend ain't a title, it's a symbol for the cost

Verse

Now I'm twenty-six and grown, got my own boards to lift

City rent's the new coal company, same collector, sharper script

Kept my own ledger folded in a Bible on the shelf

Mark for every hustle that could've buried me myself

Two for every time the block ran red before the dawn

One for every partner who got faded, moved, or gone

Learned to carve my grief in silence, no eulogy, no speech

Every scar's a syllable in a language none can te